We examine the role of government for growth in 64 industrialized and developing countries, considering both expenditure and financing aspects of government. Recognizing that there are differences between the two country groups leading to severe heteroskedasticity, we use weighted least squared...

Is the role of government different in poor countries? We examine the government's role for growth in 40 LDCs with low infrastructure levels and limited access to capital. We consider both expenditure and financing aspects of government activity, but cannot conclude that governments in LDCs...

This paper uses a stochastic overlapping generations model to answer the following question: How does the way the government structure its debt affect the term structure of interest rates? The analysis shows that the critical factor in determining the impact of public debt management on the term...

In this paper we introduce the Smooth Permanent Surge [SPS] model. The model is an integrated non lineal moving average process with possibly unit roots in the moving average coefficients. The process nests the Stochastic Permanent Break [STOPBREAK] process by Engle and Smith (1999) and in a...

We start by presenting a reduced-form multiple default type of model and derive abstract results on the influence of a state variable X on credit spreads, when both the intensity and the loss quota distribution are driven by X. The aim is to apply the results to a concrete real life situation,...

We show how it is possible to generate multivariate data which have moments arbitrary close to the desired ones. They are generated as linear combinations of variables with known theoretical moments. It is shown how to derive the weights of the linear combinations in both the univariate and the...

The detection of structural change and determination of lag lengths are long-standing issues in time series analysis. This paper demonstrates how these can be successfully married in a Bayesian analysis. By taking account of the inherent uncertainty about the lag length when deciding on the...

The panel cointegration test of Larsson et al (1998) test for the maximum number of cointegrating relations in a dynamic panel given the assumption of a common cointegrating rank. This paper presents a test for this assumption. The test is based on the test statistic of Larsson et al (1998) and...

In this paper we propose an alternative method for investigating the sources behind the behavior of real wages and unemployment. The statistical model we study is a certain structural error correction model, a so called common trends model, which has become popular in the empirical...

Simulations are used to check the probability of detecting a time-varying equilibrium correction by applying the existing tests of no cointegration and parameter constancy. Smooth transition regressions are chosen to describe the nonlinearity and the Johansen cointegration test and the Lin and...